The website owned by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, InfoWars, received a press credential to cover the White House, its man in Washington tweeted Monday.
The pass was apparently a temporary, one-day pass but that did little to tamp down the outrage.
It's the latest entrée into the mainstream for Jones, a man who turned a show on an Austin, Texas, public access channel into a conspiracy theory-pumping media empire, funded by hawking survivalists products — and who has come under increasing scrutiny as his fame has grown.
Jones shot to national prominence after declaring the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a government hoax designed to take away gun rights. Connecticut’s U.S. senator, Chris Murphy, took to Twitter to blast InfoWars getting the press credential.
Beyond the Sandy Hook conspiracy, Jones recently retracted two conspiracy theories he peddled under threat of legal action: One claimed that the basement of a local Washington, D.C., pizza joint served as the nerve-center of a child abuse ring allegedly linked to Hillary Clinton. (For starters, the building has no basement.) The other claimed that Idaho yogurt company Chobani was caught "importing migrant rapists."
Those retractions came as Jones fought to retain sole custody of his children in a Travis County family court, where his attorneys argued that his show persona was just an act. (Jones' ex-wife would go on to win joint custody.)
Meanwhile, Jones' man in Washington, Jerome Corsi has a long and controversial track record as well. In 2011, he authored "Where's The Birth Certificate?" which was published three weeks after President Barack Obama released his birth certificate to combat the conspiracy theory he was not born in the United States.
That theory was promoted by Jones and made famous by now-President Donald Trump.
Years earlier, in 2004, Corsi was a central figure in the "Swift Boat" attacks on then-Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts that included co-authoring a book questioning Kerry's war record.
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